I think more advanced civilizations capable of long distance space travel
search for planets with life, and then harvest as much new information from
the nature as possible to then later make use of it technologically. The
rainforests lose an immense ammount of species at a rapid rate due to
deforestation, and those species all have different ways to go about. In
other words, an immense source of information for mechanical properties,
chemical compounds and tricks used by organisms to bypass problems.﻿